Australian government asks us all a question
Voting age Australians are all to be asked in a referendum, held on 14th October, 2023, a simple question. Will Australian people allow this change to be made to the Australian Constitution?
The question will pass, if an overall majority of people, and also a majority of people in a majority of the 6 States, say “YES”.
The putting of this question represents a lot of time, consultation, and hard work by a lot of people. In particular the work of representatives of the indigenous communities that in 2017 crafted the “Uluru statement from the heart”. Below is a link to a brief audio file, that asserts the 60,000 years of indigenous existence in land of Australia, and the resilience and worth of its culture, and their need to communicate with our “Modern” culture.
https://ulurustatement.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/USFH-Megan-Davis.m4a
A booklet for the Referendum has been published, and sent to all enrolled voting addresses in Australia. Like all such referendum, it includes a few pages of statements for each of the proponents of the “YES” and “NO” cases. Here is link to the english version — https://www.aec.gov.au/referendums/files/pamphlet/referendum-booklet.pdf
This question should not be dismissed for trivial reasons. This question in general concerns the current and historical “reconciliation process” between the culture of the living descendents of the indigenous peoples of Australia, and the culture of the white european invaders and settlers that has been an ecological disaster in the making since the “First Fleet” convict settlement in Botany Bay in 1788.
I will vote “YES”. I believe we all need to start listening to a representative voice of the indigenous culture of this land, on all the cases where our actions directly and adversely impact them. This would be a nice principle of government to actually have. Those most impacted by decisions at least get a voice to put their case. This simple “voice” proposal is unfortunately no where nearly enough to counter the heavy-weights of money-vested interests in Australian politics. But these powers that be do fear it so much more.
Even more so we need to be listening to nature itself, and asking ourselves the deepest of questions about the value of our fossil fuel powered lives.
In terms of valid arguments, the “NO” case, as made out in the booklet, and also canvased by various oppositional political “voices” in Australia, is the greatest pile of bullshit I have ever seen amassed to oppose a referendum question. It is such an odious collection of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, that it begs a new question, “What are the principal vested interests driving the No case”.
FUD by itself, does not identify the hidden political players that simply don’t want to put their hands up. Obviously these conservative interests, since the “No” case is driven by a majority of the conservative party, and fear of change is a strong conservative mentality.
A question that cannot be put the people, let alone asked at all, by government political parties controlled by fossil fueled, bank finance, corporate and military controlled civilization, is “Should Australia Reduce its Mining and Exports of Fossil Fuels”?
According to opinion polls the FUD campaign for our expensive, time and energy consuming Referendum question, has already destroyed enough popular goodwill to vote “YES”. With such a buckshot scattergun of deadly ammunition, lies and disinformation, to kill “YES”, too many people can find an emotion backed reason to vote “NO”.
An article in online news journal “Crikey” wonders if the “YES” campaign is a strategy of picking the wrong fight at the wrong time. Its projection and failure can only benefit the fossil fuel miners and exporters that control Australian politics.
Yes, our acquisitive and fossil fueled capitalist culture has pushed aside indigenous culture and land management, and tried to disintegrate its social, family and cultural bonds. First nations people are said to be 3–4% of our population, and this is being declined by dilution from Australia’s high immigration rate. The invasion is still happening.
Most Australians live in fossil fuel powered suburbs, have fossil fuel dependent jobs and lives, drive fossil fuel powered cars, and lots of big transport trucks are required to feed them and supply everything imported from a global fossil fueled industrial world. In return Australia ships large quantities of coal and gas to the rest of the world. That is our devils bargain deal, which is never, under just about all circumstances, never to be put to referendum style question.
The crikey article says our far flung city suburbs contain remaining
“significant strands of exterminatory and eliminationist racialism, which is held as the necessary complement to a settler notion of identity arising from possession and transformation of the land, of the making of it into something else.”
All the new migrants, of diverse backgrounds, are coming in hoping to make better fortunes than in their land of origin.
The sad thing about the referendum, given the rising “NO” tide, is that agreeing to a constitutional “voice” does not cause Australians to give up special rights or privileges, nor does it grant first nations people special privileges not already granted to ourselves.
For students of history, we do really know, that all of our many past efforts of civilizations have been temporary. They arose, briefly flourished, consumed their resources and collapsed. Technologies derive cultures, cultures derive behaviours, of horticulture, agriculture and pastoralism.
And now Industrialism, with its most toxic form of Global Neoliberalism. We are born into cultures and children are naturally reared to accept and adapt to them. Cultural mindsets and personalities thus persist over many generations, developed with effects detectable in fetus growth in the womb. I therefore have no doubts in my mind that first nations peoples culture and thinking still strongly persists, with active pride, in most of those Australians that identify themselves as such, regardless of degrees of genetic mixing with invading humans.
Over time we have grown our toolkits of knowledge, continued to be horded and practiced. Until our extinction we will keep searching for the next surplus of resources and technology to expand again. Our generative culture is a species like locusts, awaiting to multiply in hordes, to consume another energy surplus.
Or as Craig Dilworth —( http://www.craigdilworth.com/too_smart_for_our_own_good.htm ) concluded from a study of the iterations of our questionable behaviour, are we in fact collectively no smarter than yeast cells. Craig described in his book “Too Smart for our Own Good”, our boom — bust and growing technology exploits as a “Vicious Circle” principle.
This article re-asks the human-yeast question. https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/humanity-yeast-cells/. Each of our expansive iterations has served to multiply the problems we must solve in order to just continue. Now the problems are global and incompatible with civilization and large scale human population survival.
Looking at it another way, I was privileged to read Eric Lee’s article on Medium, entitled “Algorithm of the Mind: The bifurcation of which you may or may not be aware”. https://medium.com/@alysion42/algorithm-of-mind-bfbf5fae1f1e.
Human beings do not have free will in the formation of their minds. The sort of minds we grow determine how we see and evaluate the world. The consequence is that the many kinds of cultural mindsets exist today, that are not be able to communicate basic understandings of each other effectively.
According to Eric Lee, we are no longer able to politically conceive of “renormalising” our species behavior and numbers towards a safe reintergration with nature.
In a “Boom world” the game has been for everyone to win pieces of exploitation rewards for themselves. Because this is a competition, violence is one of many means employed to be a “winner”, and get a growing stake in a powerful future. In the “Bust world” the game is now becoming for everyone to hang grimly on to what little they think they have acquired, and as they lose it, to take it off someone else by whatever violence comes to hand.
Both phases of ecological instability are necessarily violent. When the competing agents are nations, we have prolonged resource consuming conflicts.
In the normalized world of species existence, humans without modern technology, that is 99% of evolutionary development, are a decidely K-strategist species. Our reproduction strategy requires a maximum of food resources to be invested in our limited numbers of offspring. The long period that our helpless young need to grow to independence requires cooperation of parents, and social groups.
Hunter gatherers with limited technical resources, work with a deep understanding of the local lived in environment. This has been explained to me being able to grow up with, to have time to be with the natural world, with “deep listening”. Any human being can learn to do this.
Our culture has not developed these attributes and survival skills, because of urban upbringing. We have broken through local ecological carrying capacity limits. Now we are in a state massive global overpopulation and over-consumption, empowered and maintained by the temporary global energy pulse from burning through our once only supply of buried fossil fuels.
Our current western culture is just now going from “Boom” to “Bust”, and the general behavior and prejudices of our population, and the politics of rich elites, are in total disbelief and denial of just how far our culture and resources are going to fall.
We are, on the tree of life, an evolutionary descendent of the very first stable and multiplying metabolic cycles. Metabolic cycles that generate both energy, and meta-stable molecular structures that carry them and reproduce them. Along came the synthesis of RNA — like catalysts and protein templates, eventually DNA. The capabilies of organic chemistry metabolism are in both the stability of its structures, to entropic degradation, and the minimal energy steps and gradients that allow their construction, and the rapidity of organization and specialisation that evolution wrought over very long periods of time. The process of oxygen respiration for breakdown of sugars, giving a production flow of high energy phosphate bond energy carriers that powers our lives and thinking, is how living beings balance out the carbon-dioxide / oxygen balance of our atmosphere.
Not so the enormous energy powers of our industrial technology, where the high energy requirements, temperatures, and pure material quality requirements produce huge amounts of growing entropic wastes, that are non-recyclable by any economic industrial means. The carbon-dioxide / oxygen balance is now impossibly out of whack. Global heating is now triggering the release of huge amounts of carbon stored in once frozen wetlands, of once cold regions of our globe.
Our industrial minds have the least free will in the matter. Our personal and social metabolisms have been culture-programmed with notions, that we should all be hell bent on going through as much stuff as possible, and be happily killing each others nations in order to succeed at this goal. Success is defined as dying with the greatest number of toys.
This process of national and corporate self-enrichment has always involved elbowing out anybody that gets in the way, particularly first nations peoples that don’t have paid national or private armies to back them up. Murder and deportation of survivors has long been in the standard playbook of the culture of industrial western civilization.
Peter Carter , a distinguished climatologist, tells us we are now too late to save ourselves from self-triggered consequences of global heating. Industrial civilization is going hell-bent for the biggest all time tipping over in global history.
Global Methane levels are now accelerating upwards, pushed by increasing emissions from thawing permafrost, and wetlands.
The rate of global heating, is set by the rate of incoming solar radiation, compared to its rate of trapping. Todays rate has never been so high, as now the oceans are absorbing on average every second, at least 10 hiroshima bombs worth of energy. I remember some decades ago when it was “only” 4 hiroshima bombs worth.
Meanwhile fossil fuel civilization is aiming to burn all the available coal, gas and oil, at increasing rates, unto the death of everything.
We’ve had 30+ years of clear warning. So now civilization is clearly committing global ecocide. That is a global human species suicide as well, although fossil fuel civilization was always going to collapse.
“The time to get engaged is now, because the Boreal Forest is burning”
Here is yet another example of the inability minds bred by industrial civilization to comprehend the demise of its privileged culture: When I first watched this Peter Carter youtube to the end, it was followed by an opportunistic advert for “Spectator Magazine”, promising to dismiss climate change as nonsense. Spectator Magazine, in service to robo-control of the minds of industrial civilization, even this year has published an article by the notorious AGW denier and rogue Ian Pilmer, titled “What Climate Crisis?” which still flat out denies that climate science has long since proven that atmosphere carbon dioxide has a pivotal role in regulating earths global climate temperature range.
As the powers of positive feed backs combine, in acceleration of global heating, I have no choice but to dish out loads of disrespect for all of the national leaderships and institutions of fossil fuel powered nations, and millions of human minds hanging on to their lifestyles of delusions.
Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky — John Lennon
Heaven was always our imagined realm in the sky. But now our billions of machines we created to speed our magical labors are turning the sky into the fires of hell above. Our oceans are warming into death zones for most of sea life.
With the greenhouse radiation imbalance we have now, reaching a hothouse equilibrium global heating of 10 degrees C is not outside the limits of our unstable climate system, according to James Hansen et al.
Not one national or state government departments of politically inconvenient questions dare ask—Is not this now the time, such that our fossil fuel production must rapidly fall?
If it were asked, the answers would be the deranged babble of economically demented rich people.
AGW — Anthropogenic Global Warming.
GHG — Greenhouse gas.